Moixa’s bigger battery boosts solar consumption

Moixa has installed 1500 home batteries across the UK, based on its 2kWh or 3kWh versions. Per kWh the latest bigger battery is the best value yet, taking advantage of falling lithium ion battery prices. To buy and install the system will cost £3950, including VAT. Installed with a 4kW solar PV system the whole bundle will cost £8,500.

The company is careful about quantifying the payback from its system. “We take a look at various data, including consumption from energy bills, property size house, and energy performance certificate ratings, for example. If it is under 10 years that is pretty good,” says Moixa’s managing director Dudley Moor-Radford.

Around 20 of the 4.8kWh batteries have been installed within homes. Target customers include larger families and big homes or households where people are at home during most days. With PV, the system can cut energy bills by up to 60%.

Two daily cycles

Doing two cycles a day the battery is expected to last for 10 years at least. “You really have two peaks in a day. The battery provides one full charge, from solar generation for the evening peak and one full charge on a time-of-use (TOU) tariff, when socket prices are cheap during the night, for the morning peak,” says Moor-Radford.

As smart meter installations proliferate they will pave the way for energy suppliers to offer customers TOU tariffs. Energy supplier Octopus Energy already offers a tariff that requires a smart meter for half-hourly energy prices, which are tied to wholesale prices and updated daily. If consumers can shift demand outside of peak demand hours of 4-7pm, which is possible with battery storage, smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers and storage heaters they buy cheaper energy based on lower wholesale prices.

Partnership discussions

Moor-Radford confirms the company is in discussions with energy companies. “On the one hand you have the ‘Big Six’, with about 18 million customers between them, and they are looking for technology solutions and platforms, like ours, that can help to improve their offering, retain existing customers and win new ones. Then you have the very agile smaller energy suppliers with business models built on providing customers with products, tariffs and service that reflect their energy needs. We think we have a valuable offering for suppliers.”

While Moixa was one of the first companies to offer the UK market a home battery system, it also developed a self-learning algorithmic software-driven platform that aggregates individual energy storage units into consolidated capacity to be traded on the grid, to balance supply and demand. GridShare operates as a simulated virtual power plant platform that will go live once batteries connected to it reach critical mass.

Using artificial intelligence to tailor the battery’s performance to meet its owner’s needs and patterns of behaviour GridShare learns how much energy the home will use, uses weather forecasts to calculate how much energy their solar panels will generate and takes advantage of TOU tariffs which reward people with cheaper prices for using electricity off-peak.

Credit: EO

Moixa plans to introduce a tool that will recommend the best energy tariff to customers based on their consumption patterns and their solar production.

The company is also working with EO Charging, a UK provider of home EV chargers. Moixa has developed a technology add-on that will provide EO’s kit with smart charging capability, topping up EVs during specified times to take advantage of cheapest electricity prices on the market.